‘Metalinguistic’ comparatives such as more
dumb than ugly or more a semanticist than a syntactician have
until recently remained largely unexamined in the formal semantics
literature (the principal exception is Giannakidou and Stavrou 2007). This paper provides
an analysis of such structures built on the intuition that they compare not
along scales introduced by gradable adjectives—as ordinary
comparatives do—but rather along a scale of (im)precision, or of how
much pragmatic `slack’ must be afforded to judge an expression
‘close enough to true’. This is expressed by reformulating the
pragmatic-halos theory of imprecision (Lasersohn 1999) in terms of a
Hamblin-style alternative semantics (Hamblin 1973) in a way that allows
degrees of imprecision—roughly, ‘halo size’—to be
directly compared.